My Socket Has Stopped Working. What Now?

One socket has stopped working and the rest of the house is fine. That narrows things down more than you might think.

Check the obvious two first

Is it just the appliance? Plug something you know works into the socket. A lamp is ideal. Then plug the original appliance into a socket you know works. It is surprisingly often the appliance or its fuse rather than the socket.

Has a breaker tripped? Open the consumer unit and look for a switch that has dropped. If one has, something on that circuit caused it.

If the socket is dead and nothing has tripped, it is a wiring fault and it needs an electrician.

Why one socket dies and the others live

Most UK homes wire sockets on a ring final circuit: a loop of cable leaving the consumer unit, passing through every socket, and returning. Because power reaches each socket from both directions, one broken connection usually does not kill anything. That is the ring doing its job, and it is also why the fault can sit hidden for years.

A spur is different. It is a single cable branching off the ring to feed one socket, so it has one supply and no second path. Break that and the socket dies on its own. A single dead socket is very often a spur.

A fused connection unit feeds fixed appliances such as extractor fans, boilers and towel rails through its own small fuse. If your dead socket sits downstream of one, check the fuse in it before anything else.

The most common cause

Loose terminals. Every socket connection is a screw clamping a copper conductor. Plugging and unplugging flexes the wiring, heat cycles expand and contract the metal, and over years a screw that was tight enough becomes a screw that is not.

A loose connection arcs. Arcing generates heat, heat degrades the terminal further, and the process runs away with itself. This is why a dead socket deserves attention even when you were not using it much.

Turn that circuit off at the consumer unit and call someone the same day if you see any of these:

• Brown or black discolouration around the pin holes
• A smell of hot plastic
• A faceplate warm to the touch with nothing plugged in
• A buzzing or crackling sound from the socket

What we check

We turn the circuit off, pull the faceplate, and look at the terminals. Loose screws and heat damage show themselves immediately.

If the socket itself is sound we test the circuit for continuity, which finds a break in the ring or a disconnected spur, and we check polarity while we are there. Reversed live and neutral is a real hazard that shows no symptoms at all until someone works on the circuit.

Can you change a socket yourself?

Swapping a faceplate like for like is not notifiable work in England and Wales. It is still live electrical work and it goes wrong in ways that are not obvious: a conductor not fully under the clamp, an earth left off, or a spur mistaken for a ring and rewired wrongly.

Adding a new socket is a different matter. In a kitchen, a bathroom or outdoors it is notifiable under the Building Regulations and needs certifying.

If you do change one yourself, isolate at the consumer unit rather than the switch, and prove it dead with a tester before you touch a conductor.